If you haven’t had a good solid headbang lately, we can fix that problem for you. And if you’ve been wondering what it feels like to suffer a cranial fracture and concussive trauma, we can take care of that, too. And we can supply both those needs in one fell swoop through our premiere of a track called “Path To Vengeance” off the debut album by Lithuania’s Crypts of Despair. Entitled The Stench of the Earth, it will be released on November 24 by those German specialists in death (metal) at Testimony Records.

Crypts of Despair first took shape in 2009, went into a hiatus in 2013, and revived in 2016, eventually assembling the revised line-up that recorded this new album, whose lyrical themes include “disgust and hatred towards humanity, death worship and the occult.”

In a nutshell, “Path To Vengeance” is death metal with an old school flavor that hits with a massive, stunningly powerful impact. Ponderous and earth-shaking at first, it changes course multiple times — first viciously rampaging, then jackhammering everything into its atomic components, then brutally battering, and then driving like the pumping pistons of some huge diesel engine. And then the band slow the pace in order to excrete an oozing, morbid melody before driving hard again to the finish line. The vocal tandem of deep horrific roars and maniacal howls just further enhances the grim and remorseless savagery of the attack.

As mentioned earlier, this thing is an irresistible headbang trigger, and it’s virally infectious as well.

You’ll find pre-order links below, along with the track list. And if you allow the Bandcamp player to continue running after you hear “Path To Vengeance” you’ll also be able to listen to a second track, the album closer “Dead Light“.

I’ve seen this kind of tactic before, and you probably have too. It means they don’t want to sell the album in a digital-only format at this point when they’ve got physical editions they want to sell first. You get a digital download when you buy the physical edition, but you can’t get digital-only unless you pay that crazy sum. You might wonder why they don’t just remove the digital-only option altogether, but my recollection is that you can’t stream music on Bandcamp without offering a digital purchase option.

I understand the tactic that’s at play here and I gotta say I still think it’s incredibly douchy. As metal fans we are no strangers to elitism that frequently rears it’s head and the “real metal fans buy physical format not digital” rhetoric probably bothers me the most. When bands themselves reinforce this is bothers me even further. Makes me wanna pirate their music out of spite to be completely honest.

I think first of all, this is typically a label decision, not a band decision. And although I don’t have any inside knowledge of this particular decision, I know that labels invest money in making physical releases, whether it’s tapes or LPs or CDs, and it’s not uncommon for them to try to give fans an incentive to buy the physical editions so they can recoup that outlay, and postpone a digital-only release to a later day. There are definitely some bands and labels that will never release music digitally, but if you browse Testimony’s Bandcamp releases you’ll see that virtually all of them have a digital-only option. So I think this is just temporary.